AMID THE FURORE of the Irish government’s move to house people fleeing war in different towns and villages across the country, it’s often been a local hotel that has become a battleground.

This has been the case in some of the most serious incidents, including the burning of a disused hotel in Roscahill in Co Galway, while this past week has seen some locals in Roscrea in north Tipperary maintain that their final trading hotel should not be used to house asylum seekers.

Protesters spoke about how they were losing a place for family and social get togethers at Racket Hall, which was followed by clashes between some demonstrators and gardaí as families were escorted to receive shelter at the hotel.

And where the feeling is genuine and strongly held, that might be due to the hotels being a “sort of modern Big House” for communities, becoming prized structures for their purpose if they’re still trading, according to historian Eamonn McEneaney.

McEneaney, who until recently was the longtime director of Waterford’s Museum of Treasures, which included the recently opened Museum to the Irish Wake, said hotels began to take a more prominent role in Irish life in the 1800s.

“Once funerals became much more middle class, for want of a better word, and when the Catholic Church became much more Victorian, some people stopped having wakes in their homes, because the Church frowned upon a lot of the raucous behaviour that happened at wakes.

“So hotels then filled that function as a place big enough to take a group of mourners who wants to come and celebrate life of the deceased,” he added.

McEneaney said they were “more democratic” than any locality’s Big House, where the aristocracy resided and which often would have employed local families as servants, and were the location for the founding of institutions from the GAA to the Labour Party.

But as recessions and a global pandemic have taken their toll, one expert believes some people are making the mistake of viewing their local hotel as a “community hub rather than a business that needs to pay its way”.

Dr Declan Jordan, Senior Lecturer in Economics in University College Cork, said a crucial factor in any hotel’s success is tourism.

“Some places would be more reliant on tourism than others and some towns simply wouldn’t have a high tourist footfall.

“The thing is, hotels are businesses. They’re for profit. So why do they do offer important functions in terms of meeting places, they’re not community halls,” he said.

A worsening economic situation has been forecast by the Irish Hotels Federation, which said 38% of its members have reported reduced bookings from Europe and 60% reported the same situation for Britain. However, no real change was reported for this year’s booking from the US.

There is a difficulty to fill rooms for many hotels outside the main tourist hotspots, Jordan added.

“So with the current offer from the government to house these people who need to be housed, then here’s an opportunity to get revenue, a guaranteed revenue in a time where it will be difficult to fill the hotel in winter midweek. There’s not going to be a high occupancy rate at that time of year,” he said.

However, Jordan added that people “We need to be a bit more questioning of the narrative that is, you know, a town must have a hotel. That the hotel most be available to the town, you know, on a free basis on a on a non profit basis. If the hotel can’t pay its way then it’s going to close.

“So it’s very hard for a community or for a town to argue that it’s so important to the town when these hotels are lying unused. Hotels are not a public service to the community.”

Another option has been demonstrated in Monaghan, where a determined group of locals in Knockatallon village set up a “community-run hotel” called The Sliabh Beagh.

It’s run by a voluntary board of directors from the local community and all of its revenue goes towards paying staff wages and funding community programmes.

While the government is considering purchasing a disused venue in Roscrea to resolve tensions with locals over Racket Hall, the chairperson of Sleabh Beagh Mary Mullen told The Journal earlier this week that she is not convinced that other community-owned venues would be a guaranteed success if they were to be set up in part by the Government.

“For anything like this to be a success, it has to come from the community itself. Someone can’t come into an area and tell you what you should have, and develop it for you and make it a success. People in the area need to have a commitment to it and interest in it long-term,” Mullen said.

In his current role as a heritage and tourism advisor to different towns across Ireland, McEneaney said there is potential in turning the buildings around and putting them to a different use which might serve the community still.

“There’s a question mark over whether the hotels can reinvent themselves, maybe by taking advantage of remote working and allowing them to become viable and community-based in that way.

“The sad thing about anti-immigration [movements], they’re fighting against migrants when the reality is a lot of staff in hotels and across the industry are likely migrants themselves and the business would just not be able to function without them.”